For my solo movement piece I have been looking into different forms of actor movement training. I am very interested in mime and have been focusing my reading on practioners such as Jacques Lecoq and Rudolf Laban.
Having researched into different ideas and styles of mime I have found I am particularly interested in character mime and occupational mime and wanted to incorporate this into my movement peice. Using pandora's box as a stimulus I have explored both physically and theoretically how a movement can denote an emotion and vise-versa. I am keen to explore differnt emotions within my peice and want to use mimicry as a way of expressing this.
The following videos are short sketches by Marcel Marceou a reknown mime artist and shows clearly how mime can be used to portray emotion and how his physicality can narrate a story to his audience.
It is fasinating how much precision goes into seemingly simple movements like picking up a cup or dancing, as shown in the clip. I was keen to explore how this was acheived and have pursued this in practical sessions with some simple mime excercises. From my reading I know it is important that you recreate the illusion of something using only your body. I was interested in the mechanical side of the discipline and began to take notice of how I hold a cup and the position of the hand, which muscles I am engaging and where the point of effort is for each singular movement, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant. Stanislavksi said that "You should always act truthfully" (Allen, 1999) and developed a method for actors to reach an inner truth, emotion memory etc. I see this search for truthfullness in mime artistry as well, the precision of movement and knowledge of the mechanisms of the body all create the illusion that actual weight/object is being handled. It is a very 'truthful' way of acting, albeit a diferent kind of truth to what stanislavski was striving towards.
In practical workshops so far I have explored excersises designed for students as an introduction to mime and found some of them very useful as a gateaway into the art of mime. As they are fairly simple movements which can be repeated or developed further, it is easy to play around with different attitudes and emotions and change movement slightly to enhance the excersise and generate more moves and ideas to explore.
The following video's are from last week and show two excercises that I particularly liked and found usefull as an introduction into mime. Georgia and I researched a few group movement excersises as well which would be good to try as a group one day this week maybe? In the video's we are setting up a tea party and working on basic movements such as picking up objects and discarding items.
Pecknold, Adrian 'Mime: The step beyond words, Dundurn, 1998
Allen, David 'Stanislavski for begginers' Writers and Readers, 1999
